SIMON WATKINS: Paul Flowers has managed to do something unthinkable - show us that career bankers aren't so bad

Wrong man: Paul Flowers' rise owed much to the discredited structure of governance at the Co-operative Group, says Simon Watkins

The Reverend Paul Flowers has performed a miracle. No, he has not turned water into wine.

Rather, he has done what a few weeks ago would have been unthinkable – he has made the title ‘lifelong professional banker’ a status to be respected.

For if Flowers is anything, he is not a professional banker. He is a lifelong committee man who has used his dog collar and his association with good causes as a stairway to great influence.

But Flowers’ rise also owes much to the unique and surely discredited structure of governance and democracy at the Co-operative Group.

Popular democracy is an easy ideal to champion, but it has no place in a body where the leadership must have expertise and experience.

This applies regardless of the lifestyle or personal failings of an individual. Even had Flowers been a model citizen of unquestioned probity, he was the wrong man to chair the Co-op Bank or to be deputy chairman of the group.

Of course, there is democracy of sorts at listed companies. Executives and non-executives are in theory selected for their skills and expertise by the board and then appointed. Shareholders then vote on whether they approve of the choice.

At the Co-op the order of affairs is largely reversed. Active members rise through its structure, which resembles more a political party than a corporation, and then, like Flowers, some might be selected to hold a senior board role.

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As we have found, it becomes difficult to simply sack such an individual in the normal sense. Flowers was paid as deputy group chairman long after he was pushed out, because he had been elected by the membership.

I do not want to suggest the model of mutual ownership is itself essentially flawed. There are many mutuals, with elements of democracy in their structure, whose method of selecting senior leaders is more traditionally meritocratic.

Nationwide and John Lewis Partnership are run by experienced finance and business professionals. Neither organisation is less of a mutual because of that.

Rogues, liars and criminals can rise in any type of body. But the Co-op’s model of lay members rising to high positions is uniquely vulnerable to the risk of the wrong person ending up in a position of great influence. This is utterly out of kilter with the requirements of the modern corporate world.

In its current chairman, Co-op Bank has shifted to a more traditionally corporate appointment in Richard Pym, who is indeed a professional banker – hopefully the first of a long line of professionals who can return the bank’s name to public respect.